


Snake (Oil) in the Grass

by adotsal



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Camp Lehigh, Catheters, Enemas, HYDRA Trash Party, Hydra spy, M/M, Sounding, Speculum, anal insertion, kinkmeme fill, medical fetish, rectoscope
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-24
Updated: 2016-06-24
Packaged: 2018-07-17 22:31:58
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,851
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7288693
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/adotsal/pseuds/adotsal
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There's a fox in the chicken coop.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Snake (Oil) in the Grass

**Author's Note:**

> Kinkmeme fill for [this HTP prompt:](http://hydratrashmeme.dreamwidth.org/1634.html?thread=3754338#cmt3754338)
> 
> "Okay, so HYDRA has been infiltrating American organizations for longer than people thought. Erskine's team at camp Lehigh? You bet one (or more) of them were secretly with the bad guys. And apart from trying to gather information, their job was to make the super soldier initiative fail. So whenever Erskine wasn't looking, they made Steve's time there a living hell.
> 
> I don't care if it's pre- or post-serum Steve, just give me humiliating medical procedures with a healthy side dish of objectification. Or maybe they keep telling him if he doesn't do (x) they make sure he's send home, but Steve's nothing but stubborn, so they have to raise the stakes every time? Not that they mind. Or maybe they touch and use his new body as if he wasn't even a person any more? He's their creation, after all, he belongs to them."

Lehigh isn't just basic. It's long hours in rooms with logic puzzles, it's one on one debates with Philips about tactics that always leave you feeling wrong footed no matter how well you defended your point of view.

It's visiting medical.

Second day Steve gets to Lehigh, he's marched to the tent set up for Doctor Erskine's team to mark down some baseline medical information. There's a curtained off area for them to strip, but it's pretty pointless since the candidates all stand naked at parade rest in a line. The doctor goes to them one by one, narrating his findings to the unflustered middle aged nurse trailing behind him with a clipboard. The first guy puts up a little fuss when the doctor tells him to turn around so he can check his rectum for signs of bad health. Steve has sympathy for the guy, but he's been in and out of hospitals and grew up with a nurse - he knows to just let a professional do their job, even if they seem like a quack. 

(Boy, can he tell you about quacks. Try having bad health when every New York doctor wants to prescribe rectal dilators and curative enemas for everything under the sun up to and occasionally including TB, Christ.) 

When it's his turn, he tries to take it with a bit more grace, though he's a little irritated with the way the Doctor is eyeing him with obvious distaste. He tries not to feel like a piece of meat being pawed over at the butchers while the doctor pokes and prods at him - prying his jaw open and looking at his teeth like he's a damn horse, sliding his fingers around his ribs and spine with bruising pressure, not even putting some slick on the rubber glove the nurse hands him before roughly shoving a finger inside Steve's ass and feeling around. He leaves Steve reeling from trying to stay upright with the force he’d put into his examination, already moving on to the next candidate.

But, then it's obstacle courses and flags and gasping breath and sore muscles and shit served on a plate in the mess. Lehigh is a lot of things.

It's medical in the evening. Ten minutes with one of the doctors or nurses. Everyone wants a nurse - the others want the pretty young nurses with hard eyes to come across all sweet when they run simple tests on their vitals, but Steve just has a stubborn preference for nurses over doctors. Growing up with a nurse for a ma had made Steve rightfully suspicious of doctors. A nurse generally knows the ins and outs of medicine from exposure, even if they don't got a fancy education. And a doctor is just as likely to look at you and declare you on death's door because he thinks he knows best and he hasn't even talked to you about your previous care. Steve prefers nurses - austere and responsible and as likely to snap at you to stop fidgeting as to come across sweet. You can trust a nurse with no patience left - they use it up on keeping things running and paying attention when you tell them stuff.

The ten minutes are generally the same every day: they take his blood pressure, his temperature, take blood samples, ask him questions about hydration and muscle soreness and general medical history. He tells them he could use glasses for seeing far off, probably - they test him and heartily agree. Just basic stuff. Palpating lymph nodes and getting groped in uncomfortable places. Your basic medical check up. 

He asks his own questions, and Nurse Fenley tells him that it's all for the study. They're going to need the info for whoever gets chosen. She's tight lipped about what exactly the experiment is, and Steve doesn't pry. The nurses like the quiet small man who lets them get on with their jobs and is always respectful.

Nobody likes the doctors, and of all the doctors nobody likes Doctor Webb is the worst.

He always checks you all over, fingers jabbing into everything, and then he feels up your ass. Steve has met doctors like him before - obsessed with the health of your rectum. Ready to blame anything wrong with you on your colon. Doctor Webb tuts over their assholes like a disappointed mother. He says disparaging things about Steve's rectal health and makes a point to say that if he's from the part of New York he says he is, it is no wonder for the sorry state of it. Steve flushes red and bites back on scathing words, fists clenching where he leans forward over an examination table. He wants to say, "fuck you, we ain't all fairies - and every fairy I've ever known was a better person than you, I'd rather be one of them than you," but he bites back. He bites it back and swallows it, leaving it to drop like a stone into his stomach. Because Doctor Webb says things, real mild, like, "you should be very careful here, Brooklyn. If I tell them about any cases of suspected sodomy you will be court-martialed before you can even drop on your knees and beg them for a chance to stay." 

The way he insinuates 'drop to his knees' - Steve feels like he could die from holding back from sinking his fist into the guy's face.

But a week in, only a handful of people (lucky Steve included) have had to deal with Doctor Webb in the small examination room, tucked away in the long low building that houses the medical facilities. Some of the guys who have had to - they joke about it. Imitate the Doctor's neutral tones as they play cards in the evening.

"Ah, yes, you see here, Private Heller: this shit in your rectum shows me that you have been consuming the poison cardboard they call dinner in the mess again. Look, examine this diarrhea on my fingers," Winslow pontificates in exaggeratedly informative tones, shoving his fingers under Arnold's nose. Arnold laughs and shoves it away.

Behind the pages of his book, Steve stifles a smile.

\- 

After a week, a handful of soldiers get called in for an hour of extra medical nightly. It's pretty easy to see that they're all Philips' favorites - the strong, determined boys with muscle and square jaws. Among them, Steve stands out even worse than normal. He's certain the only reason he's being considered is because Doctor Erskine is peddling him hard to the brass.

Because of this dubiously rewarding belief in him, Steve spends his second week getting poked, prodded, and measured. It's mostly really specific measurements and strength limit tests. How long you can hold your breath, how wide your nostrils are, where your skull is bumpy - stuff like that.

The third night is different, though. Steve ends up with Doctor Webb.

From the moment he steps inside, Doctor Webb looks like Steve stomped his boot into his favorite dog's neck. Doctor Webb eyes him with that same distaste and says mildly, "I was expecting Private Bloom. I suppose you'll have to do."

Very first thing, Doctor Webb tells him he's going to need him for two hours. Steve can't exactly argue, so he's real agreeable about it. Sure, asshole. Whatever you say, you slimeball.

Doctor Webb has him strip and takes some measurements - nothing more invasive than the previous days, when a young nurse grabbed him by the dick without warning and noted every detail about his genitals from foreskin length to the size and shape of his testes (he'd about had a heart attack).

Today, the notes are just some simple measurements of his eyes, probably. The doctor pries his eyelids up with a small hooked instrument and shines a light into them until Steve feels his eyes water enough to cause small streams down his cheeks. 

Doctor Webb tuts and says, "now, now, Rogers, surely you're a man, despite your stature. You can handle a simple check up," as he swabs something under Steve's eyelid before letting it drop, leaving his eye feeling like there was something burning and rough lodged in there.

Steve scowls and feels the familiar pinch of indignation. But he fights it down. This is his chance to prove himself. So what if this guy already hates him? So what if it's unfair? He'll prove himself, and show him the kind of man he is.

When the doctor tells him to get up on the table on his side and pull his leg up so he can administer an enema, Steve goes without question. He sets his jaw and waits for it. Doesn't react when the doctor fills up two balloons along the nozzle, one inside and one out, locking the nozzle inside. Doesn't cringe when the doctor uses a couple more quarts than he's ever had. Doesn't wince when the doctor squirts more water into the balloon valve, puffing them up far larger and tighter than they need to be.

Steve just lays there. Lets the doctor examine his foreskin with rough fingers as his stomach cramps around warm soapy water. He doesn't say anything as the minutes stretch on, the doctor still taking arbitrary notes on everything from his belly button to his earwax. But when he starts cramping really bad, Steve knows it's got to have been over half an hour. He can't stop himself, sure that the doctor has just forgotten.

"How long are we keeping the enema in?" he tries to ask casually, but his voice is a bit too tight for the act he's trying.

The doctor looks down at his watch, "Private Rogers, it has only been forty seven minutes. Surely you can wait out the full hour? I suppose if the discomfort is too much, I can let you release the injection, but it's a bit disappointing..."

Steve grits his teeth, "No, sir. That won't be necessary. I can do this as long as you need me to."

It's twenty more horrible minutes by the clock on the wall before the doctor lets him release into a bedpan in the corner. Steve doesn't say a damn word, no more how much his stomach cramps up while he waits. He's embarrassed by the way the doctor watches him, though. And insists that he be the one to swipe Steve off with an alcohol soaked rag.

He's ready for this to be over. Now. But the doctor tells him to lean over the gurney, so he does. Just more of Doctor Webb and his rectum obsession, just a bit longer and he can go back to the barracks.

The doctor just sighs sadly and tells him he's too short for this to work. Steve climbs back onto the gurney with shaky legs, follows the doctors directions until he's on his elbows and knees, his anus exposed to the air in the examination room.

"Are you familiar with rectoscopes, Private Rogers?" There's a sound of something metal sliding against something else.

"...Yeah."

"I suppose you would be, with your history of disease," Steve is trying not to believe the doctor is actually sneering down as his goddamned butt, but his tone is pretty damning.

Cold, lubricated metal presses abruptly against his hole, and Steve has to fight not to jump. Without giving him a moment to adjust, the doctor is pushing the rectoscope hard against him until his anus gives. The cold metal slides in, hard and uncomfortable, reaching deep enough to cause spasms inside Steve's colon.

Steve bites his lip, face hanging down between his shoulders.

The sound of metal and the feeling of something jarring the metal shaft. Air rushes in, where Doctor Webb has removed the center of the rectoscope. 

Steve can't hold back a small quiver, which is immediately met by an exasperated sigh from behind him. He feels himself flushing with shame.

"I trust that you can hold still for just a little longer, Private? This is really not a very strenuous position, I am already making concessions for your stature and health, surely - "

"Not a problem, sir," Steve bites out.

The doctor hums speculatively, shifting the rectoscope as he presumably examines Steve's insides. Without warning, the rectoscope is swiftly removed. There was not enough lubricant on it, and Steve feels his rectum drag against it uncomfortably, his rim puckering outwards slightly for a moment as it leaves.

He relaxes slightly, but quickly finds another reason to be tense when the doctor's fingers return to his anus and begin prying it open with the index fingers from both hands. Steve can't help letting out a grunt. 

"Private Rogers," the doctor pauses his administrations, admonishing, "you really don't have a very impressive tolerance for discomfort, do you?"

"I can do this all day," Steve spits out.

For ten more minutes the doctor feels around Steve's entrance, stretching and pulling, as Steve seethes. The dragging friction of the thick sterile gloves leaves Steve feeling raw and sick.

By the time he's allowed off the table he can't even look the doctor in the eye. He dresses himself and is dismissed in mortified silence.

In the barracks he feels so angry with himself for letting Webb get to him. It's nothing doctors haven't done to him before, nothing people haven't said to him on a dozen streets. But his thoughts ache with indignation and hurt pride. It makes him even more disappointed with himself that he’s so upset in the first place. 

\- 

It's a couple days into the third week when things start to really go to Hell.

It's a little after 0300 hours when Steve blearily wanders into the latrine and finds Private Bloom. Bloom's pale as a sheet, sweating buckets, and crumpled into a ball between two toilets. Bloom looks up, panicked. 

"Hey Rogers," he grits out, oddly convivial for the time of night and the way he looks like he might keel over.

"Oh Hell, Bloom - what's wrong? Are you sick?" Steve is kneeling in front of Bloom in a few strides, hands upraised but too unsure of help's welcome to just start groping the guy for injuries. There's no sick in the toilets or spattered on the floor, he notes in the back of his mind. He’s already marking down symptoms and trying to see in the dim light the way Bloom's eyes look. He suspects food poisoning, having already watched several other guys shitting out their brains into these toilets over the last few nights. For someone with such a crummy immune system, New York and poverty sure have given Steve a hell of an iron stomach. The mess food doesn't bother him. (Much.)

"Fuck no, I wish," Bloom says, high and reedy, "it's that damn Webb."

Steve feels the hairs prickle on the back of his neck.

The thing is, Steve knows that Erskine is pushing for him, but he honestly isn't sure that Bloom doesn't deserve it more. He's not a bully like the rest of the top candidates (who are mostly defined by their physical strength and ability to not completely fumble when given orders), and he's almost as good as Steve at the strategy and logic tests. He's calmer, too. Less prone to getting sore at people. Steve could see Bloom being an amazing soldier, an amazing leader. If there's one thing that could make him a bad choice it's his tendency to daydream - Bloom sometimes stops paying attention to the world, too busy thinking about something else. Still, when the cards are down, Steve is pretty certain he's a good guy who has his head on straight.

"What'd Webb do?" Steve asks, feeling how dry his mouth suddenly is.

"It's my dick," Bloom hisses angrily, wild eyed. Steve realizes that Bloom isn't just curled around himself, he's got his hand between his legs and he's clutching himself.

"Oh, uh -" Steve isn't sure what to say. If this was Brooklyn, he'd briskly tell Bloom to drop trou. Steve's long and storied history of medical ailments and nurse mother - and honestly, his bossy, busy-body nature - had made him a sort of amateur doctor substitute in his building. Most of them were too poor to pay for help, but they knew they could go around Rogers' flat and ask him about their weird warts or wet coughs.

"Yeah, I know," says Bloom shakily, "I told him he did something wrong, but he just brushed me off and now I - he fucked me up, Rogers."

That sounds incredibly ominous. Steve can feel his own genitals trying to retreat.

"What'd he do?" He asks again, slowly.

Bloom pulls a face. "He put this - this metal thing up there - and I told him it it wasn't right, was too big, but he just kept - and anyway, something - something split and now I can't _piss_ without feeling like someone shoved a lit cig up there."

Steve squares his jaw and prepares to get socked in it, "look, this is gonna sound real bad - and I wont blame you for punching me - but my ma was a nurse and I know some things, if you want me to take a look," Steve winces. He hopes Bloom isn't the kind of guy who - he just hopes it's not going around the base tomorrow that that fairy Rogers 'knows some things' about dick.

There's an long moment of silence where Steve is preparing himself to get one hell of a punch but then Bloom replies, meekly and gratefully, "would you?"

"Yeah. Yeah, just, uh. Go ahead.” He shuffles a couple feet back on his knees so Bloom can uncurl his legs and open his fly.

As soon as Steve sees the sad swollen head on Bloom's cut cock held aloft in Bloom's palm, he has to bite back a curse. It's bright red along the slit with a little swollen split leading down the glans.

"So, he what, he put a catheter up there?"

"No, it was this little metal rod, like a pencil. Hurt like shit on the way in, and I got that cut. But then a few hours later it started hurting way up inside. I can barely get any piss out. Like trying to pass mashed potatoes through a straw - it just ain't going. Happened yesterday, but when I went in tonight the Doc said it was fine. It's not fucking fine, though!” Bloom growls. Steve hisses out a shush in response to Bloom’s rising voice.

"Right," Steve nods, determined, "I'll be back."

It's stupid. It’s _real_ stupid. He's had infections flushed out of his lungs. He's had wounds irrigated. He's watched his mother administer bladder flushes when he was just a kid. But he's never done what he's about to do.

He steals into the medical facility, small enough and quick enough to avoid the tired men on watch. He takes iodine solution, a sterile water container, and a clean syringe. 

In the middle of an army latrine Steve gives a near stranger a series of urethral flushes with stolen supplies. It is absurd. Bloom gasps and cusses his way through it, even as Steve tells him to shut up before someone comes in and they get in serious trouble.

Afterwards, he hides the iodine in his things and Bloom helps him hide the rest of the evidence around the base.

Afterwards, he gets the most awkward hug of his life from a grateful Bloom - who still looks like a shaking mess and says there's other things wrong with him from his time with Webb, but the rest'll heal.

-

Two days later, Bloom and all his things are gone from the barracks when Steve gets back from medical. Steve wonders if they found out about the medical supplies, wonders what the hell happened. Selfishly, guiltily, he hopes Bloom didn’t tell on him.

The next night his medical is with Doctor Webb. Every night for the next nine days - until he gets into a metal coffin and gets shot full of serum - is with Doctor Webb. 

 

-

The first day is bruises.

There are small glass jars heated to a precise temperature and lined along his lower back or across the back of his thighs. They cool and leave perfect purple circles. Doctor Webb says, “we must test the healing timeline of contusions. 

Clamps pinch along his sides, threads screwed to an exact pressure. 

The bruises from Webb meld with the bruises from his daytime courses.

“A pity we only have so long… I doubt the data will be viable. It does not look like you are a very fast healer, Private Rogers.”

His body aches with new islands of swollen hemotomas as he shifts on his cot, trying to find a position that doesn’t hurt (while also not setting the springs in the bed off badly enough that someone’ll chuck a boot at him).

-

The second is skin and blood.

Tissue samples from his thighs leave inches of raw stretches of skin that Steve has to try to keep covered. The coverings shift during the day, the shallow strips of revealed dermis ooze liquid and drops of blood. 

Abrasions on his calves are caused by a metal file.

This can’t have anything to do with the study, Steve thinks. He questions, and the Doctor threatens to have him removed from the study if he doesn’t comply.

“You do know what happened to Bloom, after all, don’t you?” Doctor Webb says, with false sympathy.

Steve clenches his jaw and thinks, just another day. Just another nine days, it’ll be over. Whatever happens will happen - he’ll be chosen or not. But it’ll be over.

The vials of blood drawn leave him dizzy when he stumbles back to the barracks. 

-

Third day is -

Well, Bloom hadn’t experienced a unique test, apparently.

Steve lays back on the examining table, naked as the day he was born. The chill of the room sets his hairs rising.

He tries not to react when the Doctor takes his prick in his gloved hand. Tries not to do anything but stare, determined, up at the ceiling.

In a sly, quiet tone, Webb asks him to please inform him if Steve thinks he’s going to vomit. It is best not to interrupt the proceedings, but a mess would be far more difficult to take care of. 

Steve’s pallor is ‘really quite concerning’. 

Steve could fucking spit he’s so mad.

Steve tries to keep still, tries not to wince when the Doctor palpates his balls roughly, leaving them sore. 

But Steve perseveres. There’s no way he’s gonna give in like that. No way he’s gonna let the Doctor tell him he’s not good enough.

The first problem comes when - well, when the Doctor starts stroking his dick and all Steve can do is swallow bile.

“Private Rogers, the test can’t be completed unless you can attain an erection. Is that possible in your health, or shall we just write today’s test off as a wash?”

Steve doesn’t - he doesn’t want to _cry_ , but biting back on the angry diatribe waiting to bubble out is making his eyes water. 

“No. I can do it. Sorry, sir.” He hates himself for apologizing. “Can I just -“ He reaches down, and the Doctor slaps his hand away.

“Private Rogers, your hand isn’t sterilized. Do you really want to make matters more difficult and make me go find an extra set of gloves for you?”

“No, sir,” he grits out. 

He tries to distance himself from the moment. Tries not to think about the feeling of rubber moving across his prick. Tries to think about being alone, not watched by the malicious gaze of this asshole.

But his prick isn’t nearly as determined as him, it appears.

“Private Rogers, you’re a very difficult subject, you realize? You really are a bit of a hinderance on the study.”

“Sir, I’m sorry - “ Steve starts, but the Doctor cuts in.

“I’m certain you are. However, it will simply have to be dealt with.” His legs are guided up into a bend and opened. A moment later there’s the cold feeling of lubricant smeared briskly across his anus. Steve bites down on his lip and closes his eyes, beyond ashamed and embarrassed. He knows enough about anatomy to know where this is going.

“If penile stimulation wont do, we’ll have to use other measures.”

The doctor presses one thick glove finger inside and after a moment Steve is curling his toes. It’s an awful raw feeling like having to piss and interrupting mid-stream. The Doctor rubs at his prostate relentlessly first with one finger and then with two - until Steve is panting, his dick finally hardening in the Doctor’s other hand.

“Excellent, Private Rogers. You’ve attained one of the most rudimentary necessities for the survival of a species,” Doctor Webb praises him sarcastically. “I’m sure you’re very proud.”

Steve locks his jaw and says nothing, feeling the miserable heat of his flushed cheeks and chest like a badge of shame.

He feels his pulse under his skin as the Doctor methodically strokes him, feels the muscles in his thighs jumping.

The Doctor drops Steve’s shaft onto his stomach and removes his fingers. He turns away, and when he turns back -

The metal pencil, Steve supposes. It _is_ about the thickness of a pencil, just about a foot long and smooth metal with an inch of gentle curve at one end and a wide stopper ball at the other.

The doctor pours a bit of surgical lubricant onto his gloves, swipes it perfunctorily around the first few inches of the curved side of the rod, then quickly across the opening of Steve’s urethra.

Steve can’t fucking breath. He wonders if he should stop the Doctor. If he’s going to get an infection like Bloom. If this fucking quack is going to give him VD with that thing - Hell, has it even been sterilized? 

But when the Doctor picks his prick back up and point the head toward the ceiling, Steve says nothing. 

“Let’s hope you can stay stiller than Private Bloom,” says the Doctor mildly. And Steve says nothing.

The tip of the rod settles against his dick, and with a bit of pressure from the Doctor it sinks in. The feeling is invasive and sickening and Steve tells himself, he’s had catheters, he’s -

Steve says nothing, because he doesn’t give a shit what happens to this body. Because even if his dick rots off, he’s got to at least _try_ to get over there. He can’t do any less than anyone else. Can’t give up just because he’s a little afraid of a test.

The rod sinks and sinks, the Doctor lets gravity do most of the work but he tugs at Steve’s cock to pull it upward along the rod. Steve registers the way flesh shifts aside for its downward descent with a distant, dizzy nausea.

At the base of his cock it slips past something tight and hits a nerve - like crunching down on something hard when you’ve got a cavity. Steve fights his entire body not to jerk away from the sensation. He tastes blood and realizes he’s bitten into the inside of his lip.

The Doctor is murmuring about the variation of his reaction, says something about neural response, Steve isn’t even - he can’t. The Doctor slides the rod out and lets it sink back in, stroking his shaft up around it the entire time. It strikes the nerve again, but Steve is ready for it. He chews harder at his lip.

“Private Rogers, your red complexion is almost as worrisome as your earlier pallor. If it will stop you from panting so, you may make sounds if you must.” 

Steve can’t give him the satisfaction, as much as his eyes are watering right now. He blinks away the wet, chews harder on his lip.

The Doctor repeats the rise and fall of the rod several more times, before letting it drop and tapping the end of the rod a couple times. The tremors feel like they’re hammering on Steve’s nerves. He can’t help the whimper. He glances at Doctor Webb, ashamed and angry.

Doctor Webb smiles. Steve looks back up at the ceiling with watery eyes.

“Hold this, Private.” Steve reaches down with shaky hands and steadies the rod with one hand and his dick with the other, afraid to shift and - prod something in there, or -

After a moment, there’s a sharp sting in his ball sack. It’s followed by an awful, aching, heavy feeling.

“What are you - “ Steve gasps.

“Simply saline,” the Doctor replies dismissively, “it’s easier to assess the health of the organ this way. Plus, we must evaluate the rate at which your body absorbs. For a baseline.”

Steve stares past his hands as the Doctor steadies another syringe against his sack. Feels the sharp sting and further ache. Sees the Doctor reach down and start grabbing at his swollen balls, sees the rough treatment of his scrotum. He feels oddly disconnected. He knows it should hurt a lot more, sees the gloved hands of the Doctor practically mashing his genitals, but for some reason the dull ache of the saline has left his balls oddly insulated from the manipulation of the Doctor.

Steve keeps having to remind himself the Doctor said ‘absorb’. They won’t - they can’t just - stay like that, can they? It’s going to -

The Doctor eventually stops his examination of Steve’s scrotum - lifting, twisting, inspecting - and grabs hold Steve’s prick once more. Steve’s hands rest on his stomach as he stares numbly down at what’s happening.

The Doctor pauses one moment, taking a stop watch from his pocket and setting it on the table. In the back of his mind, Steve admonishes the Doctor for using supposedly gloved hands to grab onto the timepiece, cross-contaminating both gloves and watch.

There’s the furious ticking as the Doctor sets it, then begins pumping his dick roughly. The rod still lodged deep inside slides across the sensitive membranes as they move up and down it, only a few inches peek out of the top of Steve’s dick and he wonders deliriously if it’s going to fall inside. The Doctor’s other hand slips under the swollen heft of his scrotum and roughly pry him open again, fingers rubbing quickly at his prostate. 

Steve wants so badly to just - just be able to be done, but the rod - resting where it is, it feels like he’ll never be able to -

He realizes he is whimpering again, bites down on his lip and clenches his eyes closed tight.

After a few more seconds, the hand on his dick moves and the rod is lifted out of him swiftly. The relief and ache where it filled him is enough to make him cry out. The fingers inside of him keep rubbing, and it’s so much at once - the sore place inside him where the rod’s end had rested seems to pry itself open with the force of his ejaculation - he sees stars as he shoots out over the Doctor’s gloves. 

It is, again, on shaky feet that he makes his way back to the barracks. The long days spent with Philips’ games have left his muscles sore and aching, but the nights with Webb have given him bruises, raw skin, a cock that feels like it’s been stabbed - that _has_ basically been stabbed, and a swollen sack that leaves him walking practically bowlegged.

In the morning, his balls are their normal size and something in him that’s been wrapped up tight and preventing him from thinking about it too hard gives out. The relief rushes in and even with the ache in his genitals, the way pissing is an exercise in panic and just on the safe side of burning pain, he’s so damn glad he sends a little prayer out.

-

Steve had almost thought maybe that it would be it. That he’d conquered the thing that had taken Bloom out, and now things would get better. The day hadn’t been spent in anticipatory dread, he’d been so relieved to have beaten -

But it doesn’t get easier.

The Doctor seems to take delight in forcing him through test after test - holding enemas for hours until he’s taking short, ragged, breaths just to breath around the swollen ache. Filling his bladder with saline, until even that comes to ache day by day. Forcing him to hold his breath under water for as long as he can - berating him for his short times until Steve is _begging_ to be given another chance to near-drown himself with stubbornness. Scalpel applied to inside of his mouth, little metallic lines in his mouth that heal faster than anything else.

When something new isn’t being introduced as a test, older tests are repeated to check their validity. The rod - the _sound_ as the Doctor informs him - comes back every other day, it feels. Every time, the Doctor gives him a sound with a wider diameter. His cock feels permanently stretched, his piss stream too wide. His rectum seems to be pried open in some way every night. 

On the sixth day, the Doctor cuts neat lines into his side with a scalpel. He cuts into the flesh above Steve’s left shoulder blade and slips a metal plate in. He sews it back up with a couple stitches. The piece of metal drives against Steve’s muscle with every movement. Steve almost doesn’t ask, too afraid he’ll be sent off like Bloom, but he has to -

“Just to check on the rejection rate of your body,” the Doctor assures him.

The pain of the plate drives Steve on through every Hellish test Philips gives them. Through every logic puzzle in a room of tired, anxious recruits, it sits there as his silent companion. He feels the swollen edge of it when he tries to sleep, the puffy line of the stitches.

It keeps him sane when the Doctor is telling him he’s a mockery of the study, that he’s a worthless subject. Keeps him from crying when the Doctor lines small clamps up and down his limbs, at his nipples, down the center of his scrotum.

On the ninth day Steve is told he is the candidate. The Doctor only gives him a swift check up that night - yanking him back and forth, examining his orifices again, checking on the plate in his shoulder and splitting open the stitches to remove the plate.

Steve could crow from victory. He could sleep for a week.

He had proved himself an excellent God damned subject.

-

Doctor Erskine is dead. And Steve feels -

Peggy is so angry, and he knows it's not just that he fucked up, knows how much time and love she's spent on this program. That she lost a friend today. But all he can think about when his thoughts swim towards her is the vividly clear expression of disgust she'd shot him before leaving to deal with things. Steve wishes -

The technicians and officers had ushered him off to the labs, hiding him away from the street like the highly classified failure his existence has become with the death of Doctor Erskine. He just -

He feels numb. He feels fantastic and horrible and intensely. He came out feeling no pain for the first time in his life. The way he'd called for one more breath, one more burst of energy, with each step as he ran after the spy - it's a strange heady feeling. Like that marvelous point in a fever when you feel sensitive to every shift in the world, but somehow invincible. With it's removal, he is suddenly acutely aware of the burn in his genitals, abdomen, and rectum that had plagued him for over a week. His skin is no longer tender and sore with recent cuts and bruises. His muscles don't ache with overuse. His joints no longer radiate pain into his nerves with every movement. He feels clear and clean, in every shred of flesh he commands.

They take him back to Lehigh in a black car. Agent Carter is thin lipped and radiating a sort of helpless anger and distress. He wonders what he radiates. His palms rest on the knees of his trousers, the fabric under his sensitive fingertips the only thing anchoring him. The sensation of adrenaline running through him is tempered by the loss of a loved one. Steve doesn't love easy, but when he does it is an intense and all consuming thing. He had loved Erskine for the respect he had shown him, for asking more from him. People have only ever asked Steve to leave things alone. No one had asked for him to focus on a problem, to be better or more than he is. Not in a long time. The expectation is a weight around his neck, but it is all the more beloved for its novelty.

He’s shuffled from room to room as they all try to figure out what to do with him. Eventually, someone tells him to report to medical to have the vestiges of the study respected by getting data about his new body. 

His health is checked over by women with tears in their eyes. His heart is perfect. His lungs are perfect. He is the picture of health. A nurse apologizes in tight tones for letting a salty drop fall onto his arm when she's taking his blood. She runs out of the room as soon as she has the sample and he can hear her sobs all the way down the hall with his perfect hearing. 

He was not the only one who lost a friend. 

He is utterly inadequate.

Howard Stark's machines under the hand of nimble nurses measure his running speed around the yard, his strength against pressure devices and with weights, his lung capacity. He does what people tell him, feels his body give and give and keep going. He feels a sinking in his perfect heart.

Doctor Webb takes him to a quiet office, far from the frowning faces and rustling worry of the rest of the facilities. He is told to strip for the fifth time that hour. He sits on a gurney covered in a white sheet.

Doctor Webb says, "I know you do not like me. I must confess, I never expected you to pass. But you are the only remainder of Doctor Erskine's work, so for his sake let us make sure it is not in vain."

He is still as the scalpel cuts into his flesh, blood staunched in a minute instead of a quarter of an hour. Listens to the scratch of the doctor's pencil against his notepad. Depth of cut, he thinks. 

Thin strips of flesh peeled away from the sides of his thighs are coiled in small liquid filled vials.

He watches the bruises rise up along his arms, created by the calibrated clamp at intervals. He watches them swell and begin to heal before his eyes as the doctor moves on. 

The implant over his left shoulder blade is placed back into him. It heals closed within minutes, an anchor over his raw nerves whenever he shifts.

He is oddly grateful. The bruises, the cuts lining up and down his limbs, his torso, his neck and face - they are painful in a way that running isn't, not anymore. He feels like he can finally breath now that his pain is being given in tribute to Doctor Erskine's memory. He is adequate when Doctor Webb pries open his mouth and puts something between his molars so he can't bite down. He is adequate when three cuts are made on his tongue, and are healed within five minutes. The spacers are removed, and the small cuts where they dug into his gums quickly heal. His mouth tastes like metal - the way the gurney smells.

He gives a blood sample, watches it swirl into the waiting vials. He thinks, almost hysterically, that this is blood people have died for. He feels sick.

He has already provided a urine sample to one of the fleet of nurses, earlier. But he does it again for Doctor Webb. The doctor stands disapprovingly as Steve squats over a bedpan for a stool sample that wont come - he hasn't eaten since yesterday, and it was afternoon when he was called to medical, hours ago. He jacks off into another cup, having to fight to get hard under the scrutiny. The doctor offers him assistance and he refuses. He focuses on the cuts and already healing bruises on his hands and forearms, the taste of blood around mostly healed cuts on his tongue, in order to orgasm. They take him away from everything long enough to come into the cup.

Afterward, the doctor wipes Steve's penis tip and anus with alcohol soaked tissues. He tosses the tissues into a waste receptacle and secures the urine sample on a metal tray off to the side. Steve looses time and focuses on the burn of the alcohol that has settled against the tip of his glans, under his foreskin. His dick is still sensitive from orgasm but he is appreciative of the familiar pain. 

"Lie down on your left side, in position," says Doctor Webb. Steve obeys. "It is a good thing we had a baseline for your old body."

He says it like this body is not just a modified version of Steve, like he has swapped out the old one for something new and foreign. He has. Steve has never scarred badly, but the lack of old burn marks and scrapes on his hands is as jarring as when the body keeps giving. He caught a glimpse of himself in glass and hasn't been able to bring himself to look at anything else reflective, afraid of - something.

He holds his right knee to his chest and feels the nozzle of an enema slipping inside. He holds the stinging water for ten minutes, oddly at peace with the burning and cramping, and then vacates into the bedpan as instructed. A second enema is administered. The body is almost too strong, and he has to force it to relax in order to not let the enema leak out and displease Doctor Webb. He stares at the blood stains on the sheet from his numerous cuts, and wonders at how he barely feels the cuts anymore and yet the sheet is nearly more red and brown with blood than white.

He holds the enema for an indeterminate length of time, his sinking feeling strangely combatted by the cramping in his colon. He is allowed to vacate, and the doctor tells him his colon capacity has increased by at least two liters. He is uncertain what to do with this data, so he says, "thanks" incongruously. Doctor Webb, it seems, is too busy ushering him back onto his side and inserting a barely lubricated rectoscope to notice. It stings, but the pain is quickly over and replaced by the strange, cold, fullness. The center is removed and air touches his insides.

The doctor exclaims over the good health of his rectum and Steve would normally be biting back questions about exactly what the hell had been wrong with the old rectum, seeing as how Webb had never adequately described his inadequacies. 

He feels empty of energy. 

He feels too full of energy to think. 

He sets his cheek to the gurney and closes his eyes, instead. The rectoscope is removed slowly, letting the doctor look all the way to his entrance. It is replaced by the speculum, which the doctor widens at a rapid pace until Steve feels the burn of his hole sharp and bright, and the bruising ache of muscles attempting to close over hard metal. Cold air washes back into him.

The doctor takes his balls in hand and begins to palpate them. Steve floats on the pain. Cuts, bruises, rectum, testicles being crushed - he lets out a few small, wordless sounds of pain. The doctor stills, his sack still clenched in his gloved hands.

"Private Rogers. Is this too much for you?"

Steve is sick with shame. He knows this body can give more. Knows the only thing stopping them would be Steve's tolerance. He feels like a child wailing about having to take cough medicine.

"No, please, don't stop," he bites out around the taste of blood in his mouth, trying not to let his pain show in his voice. 

There is a tense moment and then the doctor continues twisting before abruptly letting go. The blood rushing back into his sack is almost more painful than the twisting.

The speculum is removed and his hole twitches closed, feeling sore and loose. It is almost immediately replaced with a bulbed bakelite dilator of a greater girth, causing Steve to bite back a curse. 

He can take it. 

The body can.

"Excellent. It's good to see you can take more without fissures. Truly, an excellent subject," Steve isn't sure what to do with the mocking tone. He keeps silent.

"Sit up, legs over the side," Webb directs as he fishes through the cabinets. Steve totters upwards, trying to comply against the strange feeling of the invasion. 

The doctor sets a bedpan under his legs, and doctor Webb approaches with the widest catheter and a tray covered in the sounds and a small jar of lubricant.

Steve winces when the first sound enters. The burn is as intense as ever, and it makes him glad that in this at least, there is no difference. Though he sort of misses how his old dick had already been loosened up over time. He avoids looking down at his new genitals, larger, redder, foreign. Not his.

"Hmm. The muscles even here are too strong. I suppose with the elasticity of your new body, it shouldn't be a problem to size up."

It is two sizes past the largest he ever took before he lets out a whimper and the doctor looks up into his face. Again, he neutrally asks, "do you need to stop?"

A tear rolls down Steve's face and he practically sobs out, "no, sir. Please, keep going."

The sound is replaced by the catheter, rubber tubing scraping and tugging more than the metal. Slid into his bladder, it immediately leaks down into the bedpan. Steve watches as his urine is drained manually, barely a trickle with all the samples he's given and the lack of water drunk. The doctor begins to fill him with the saline, until his bladder fills uncomfortably, bulging against his lower abdomen. Saline leaks out around the edge of the catheter and doctor Webb tsks, disappointed.

"It appears the muscles here are still too weak under pressure. A pity," his hand clenches down on Steve's tip around the tubing, dragging the hose out roughly as Steve shivers with the pain. When the tube is fully out, the doctor plugs his slit with his thumb until he holds a large, tapered sound to it and slides it home. It slides all the way down to that strange sensitive place by his balls, with only it's end just sticking out of his slit. At the tip is a ball, which nestles in Steve's glans. The doctor pulls his foreskin over the ball, and then with a flash of movement, there is a needle lancing through either side of his pulled taught foreskin. Steve gasps, nearly flinching away before he can stop himself.

"Careful. Don't worry, your new body will heal it when we are done," the doctor slips a metal ring through the bleeding holes, tightening it back on itself with efficient movements. 

The saline in his stomach contends with the stretch in his cock and the sting of his bleeding foreskin for Steve's new favourite anchor.

"Lay back down," Webb says, guiding Steve's docile form back.

"We need to test your water retention and swelling reduction," he says.

Steve nods along, because he is certain he is supposed to. What this apparently means is injecting saline into Steve's pectoral muscles until the skin over his round chest muscles sits swollen and gelatinous, like a pair of jiggling breasts. The doctor palpates his new additions and Steve gasps for air that feels as thin as he remembers it used to. The swollen tissue is sensitive, but he tries not to wriggle as the plugs in his ass and cock make him dizzy every time he is reminded of their existence.

"Up, onto your knees and elbows," Steve squirms onto his stomach, and then wobbles to his knees. He has to keep one hand on his cock to brace the sound as he totters into position, and then he brings it back down to rest his head between his forearms. The saline in his breasts dangles obscenely from him, his nipples swollen and tender. The doctor slowly slides his rectal dilator out, and he feels his skin drag against it, clinging as it leaves. The tears wont stop, but he tries his best to just quiver instead of letting out embarrassing sobs. He's already failing, he needs to stop making it worse.

The doctor speaks, but Steve honestly doesn't remember from one second to the next what he says. His new balls are pulled back from between his legs and he barely flinches as the needle slides home, filling his sack with liquid. They are dropped back into place, and the heavy swollen feeling of them resting between his thighs makes his feeling of distaste for this body oddly mitigated. The pain and distortion is familiar. It's perfect. He finally stops crying.

"I need you to inform me now if you are about to orgasm," says the doctor. And then there are fingers in his ass, pressing roughly on his prostate. The sensation is intense, pressing tissues into the sound seated deep within him. His organs clench and his swollen bladder feels like it could explode with the pressure.

He is embarrassed that he's immediately started to pant, a series of little "ah, ah" vocalizations slipping out without permission. The fingers against his prostate don't let up, and soon he feels his cock getting hard around the sound. His foreskin stretches with the growth, pulling on the ring and reopening the holes around the piercing so that if he looks down between his legs he can see blood dripping off the tip of his penis. 

"Now," he gasps, "it's now," and he feels the doctor pressing even harder and then he can't help the full body shake as he feels something roll over him - something like coming, but without the release of his balls (his balls which swing, swollen, behind his blood dripping cock).

His tender cock is pulled back between his trembling legs and examined. 

"Excellent, not a bit of leaking."

The bedpan is placed between his legs, and Steve is so grateful that he is going to be allowed to release without having to move that he nearly starts to cry again.

The piercing comes out, the sound popping out under the pressure with a metallic plink, watery ejaculate and saline pouring out of his loose cockslit like a faucet.

Steve groans with the intensity of the relief, spurting out a few more drops as he rocks back and forth. And then the bedpan is gone, and Steve wonders if it would be okay if he dropped from hands and elbows onto the table, because he feels weak with it. But doctor Webb's fingers are back inside his bruised hole, rubbing hard against his prostate. Steve's mouth opens around a silent moan - he is too embarrassed to even breath lest he make a sound.

"Let's compare your pre serum capabilities to your new stamina, shall we?" says Doctor Webb, cheerfully.

By his fourth orgasm, there is a blood stained pool of ejaculate between his legs and Steve has dropped to brace his shoulders against the table. His swollen breasts jiggle and scrape against the blood dotted sheet as Webb's fingers rock him back and forth. After the second orgasm, Webb began to jack him off as well. The holes in his foreskin keep being torn open with each stroke.

Steve is amazed by how good he feels. Or not good, perhaps, but okay. For the first time since stepping out of that goddamn machine, his body feels like his own. His organs are bruised and stretched, his skin burning with myriad cuts, and his cock and ass feel like they've been taken into a back alley and beaten to hell for a smart comment, but he can't notice his disproportionate body when he's focusing on the pain.

By the tenth orgasm, his fourth dry one, his body is shaking and his teeth are chattering. 

His next orgasm doesn't come for a long time, but when it does he is silently leaking tears. It comes to him weakly, like a clarifying zap to his nerves. Tremors wrack him for several moments and then he goes slack. He doesn't know when, but at some point between eight and eleven, his knees slid out sideways and forward until the doctor could no longer reach his cock. He's been curled up on the table while Doctor Webb palpates his swollen and almost numb feeling sack, and pounding his prostate with a metal dilator. The dilator is removed now, and Steve wonders at the feeling of his hole trying desperately, and failing, to clench closed.

The doctor prods his anus, making "hmm" sounds and plucking at the rim. He pulls Steve's trembling legs back and rounds the gurney, twisting Steve onto his left side. He peers into Steve's eyes, lifting his eyelids and shining lights. Steve doesn't know how to respond. He lets it happen. Lets the doctor use the same gloves he used to prod his rectum to examine his face. The tear tracks are wiped away, but steadily replaced by Steve's stupid inability to stop crying.

"Sorry," Steve whispers hoarsely. Doctor Webb just tuts and opens his mouth.

"I can barely tell where the cuts were," he says, appreciatively, pulling at Steve's slack tongue. He pulls Steve's head to the edge of the gurney, rubbery fingers strange behind Steve's jaw.

Doctor Webb pushes aside his lab coat, undoes his belt and fly, and pulls out his half hard cock. 

"Open," he says gently, leaning in and tracing his cock over Steve's lips, wet already with drool and snot and tears.

Steve lets his jaw fall open, and takes the Doctor in his mouth.

Picture an anchor between the implant in his back, his swollen breasts and aching body, the hard musky flesh between his lips. He swims on it. 

The doctor thrusts in and out. He strokes Steve's jaw with one hand and keeps two fingers between his molars with the other.

Steve nearly chokes on the bitter semen that shoots out over the back of his throat. Doctor Webb withdraws his softening cock and rights himself. He gathers the notebook and the samples and says, "have a good day, Private Rogers."

The door closes behind him softly. It is a long time before Steve stands up and gathers his clothes.

The sheet gets stuffed, guiltily and ridiculously, into the waste receptacle. He can't bring himself to deal with the bedpan, feels like he might vomit if he does, so he just dresses and leaves.

Inside the empty barracks, he sets himself down and sleeps, the taste of come bitter and salty on the back of his throat. 

\- 

The cuts and bruises are gone the next day, impossible to see unless you look. His ass and cock ache, but he's not sure if it's his imagination. His piss comes out normal, with no burn whatsoever.

Steve goes to breakfast, where he eats enough that he finally stops feeling dizzy and weak. 

He can’t understand _why_ it happened, and that’s what drives him mad.

It wasn’t - it wasn’t a test. He is pretty _damned_ certain of that. But why the hell would Doctor Webb do that? It makes him think of the way bullies would corner a small man to feel big. It makes him think of how powerful a man must feel to stand over Steve’s current body and feel that he’s conquered it.

He worries. He worries about Bloom, who’d been so much stronger than him back at the start. Who could be rotting in an army jail for sodomy right now, for all Steve knows.

His answers are only answered when a frantic nurse retrieves him from where he’s been waiting in the barracks for instructions. She’s one of the younger ones and she looks pale and nervous as she leads him to Colonel Philips’ office.

Inside, Philips is sat behind his desk, scowling down at the documents on it. Agent Carter sits in a chair against the wall. She looks haggard and unkempt in a way Steve has never seen her - her make up just this side of smudged, her spine bent as she rests her elbows on her spread knees. She looks up blearily when he enters, smiles coldly at him and dismisses the nurse.

“Tell me, Rogers,” Philips begins, sounding like it’s causing him great suffering, “did Doctor Webb administer any tests on you yesterday?”

Steve feels the bottom of his stomach drop out. A prickle of sweat rises along his hairline. “Yes, sir.” He tries to keep his voice calm and even. He hopes he succeeds.

-

Doctor Charles Webb had been a spy. He had absconded in the night with a suitcase full of data from the operation. Steve details the circumstances of the tests in the broadest way he can. Tissue, blood, waste, and semen samples. Pain thresholds. Skin elasticity. Breath capacity. Speed of healing.

He doesn’t say: he was trying to break me. He was trying to make the subjects weak. He might have succeeded.

He can’t bring himself to. Not with the pitying but exasperated looks the Colonel and Agent are giving him. Not with the way they pretty obviously must think he’s a God damned idiot for letting it happen.

The entire time, the anchor of the plate over his shoulder blade keeps him speaking. Keeps him from begging them for forgiveness.

-

In the latrine he shoves aside his shirt collar, popping buttons off and not caring as they roll away. He finds the edge of the plate sticked out of his skin, already being forced out by his body. He rips it out. He throws it on the floor, and even from the distance his newly perfect vision allows him to see the imprint of an octopus pressed into the plate, obscured only vaguely by the blood.

-

Before they send him off on tour, he asks about Bloom. All he can think about is what would have happened if he’d said something before - maybe Erskine wouldn't have - maybe Bloom wouldn't have to have -

Bloom was sent home for a twisted knee during a training exercise. Useless to the study.

Honorable discharge.


End file.
